This first comprehensive analysis of the 3,000 telegrams between
Soviet spies in the US and their superiors in Moscow, decoded
shortly after WWII, may well, as the authors believe, "change the
way we think about twentieth-century American history." The Venona
transcripts, while revealed in part to the Soviets by agents like
Kim Philby, were one of the most closely guarded US secrets, since
the US didn't want the Soviets to understand the full extent of the
damage they had sustained. In one of the extraordinary revelations
of this book, the authors, Haynes (History/Library of Congress) and
Klehr (Politics and History/Emory Univ.) note that Army Chief of
Staff Omar Bradley denied President Truman direct knowledge of the
project for fear of a leak, while informing him of the substance of
the messages. Moreover, the information could not be used in
prosecutions of those guilty of espionage. The consequence was the
growth of the widespread belief that the very existence of the
charges were evidence of anti-Communist paranoia. The authors, who
have previously written seminal analyses of Soviet activity in the
US (The Soviet World of American Communism, 1998, etc.), use the
decrypts to show how extensive Soviet espionage actually was. In
addition to the nuclear spies and top agents like Alger Hiss, who
presided at the first session of the United Nations, and Harry
Dexter White, the number two at the Treasury, the transcripts
identify 349 US citizens and other residents who had a covert
relationship with Soviet intelligence. There were 11 well-placed
spies in the Treasury, 15 in OSS, many in other key departments. In
fact, the authors have changed their view of the Communist Party of
the US, which they conclude "was indeed a fifth column working
inside and against the United States in the Cold War." The
reverberations from this cool, balanced, and devastating appraisal
will be heard for many years to come. (Kirkus Reviews)
Only in 1995 did the United States government officially reveal the
existence of the super-secret Venona Project. For nearly fifty
years American intelligence agents had been decoding thousands of
Soviet messages, uncovering an enormous range of espionage
activities carried out against the United States during World War
II by its own allies. So sensitive was the project in its early
years that even President Truman was not informed of its existence.
This extraordinary book is the first to examine the Venona
messages-documents of unparalleled importance for our understanding
of the history and politics of the Stalin era and the early Cold
War years. Hidden away in a former girls' school in the late 1940s,
Venona Project cryptanalysts, linguists, and mathematicians
attempted to decode more than twenty-five thousand intercepted
Soviet intelligence telegrams. When they cracked the unbreakable
Soviet code, a breakthrough leading eventually to the decryption of
nearly three thousand of the messages, analysts uncovered
information of powerful significance: the first indication of
Julius Rosenberg's espionage efforts; references to the espionage
activities of Alger Hiss; startling proof of Soviet infiltration of
the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb; evidence that spies
had reached the highest levels of the U.S. State and Treasury
Departments; indications that more than three hundred Americans had
assisted in the Soviet theft of American industrial, scientific,
military, and diplomatic secrets; and confirmation that the
Communist party of the United States was consciously and willingly
involved in Soviet espionage against America. Drawing not only on
the Venona papers but also on newly opened Russian and U. S.
archives, John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr provide in this book
the clearest, most rigorously documented analysis ever written on
Soviet espionage and the Americans who abetted it in the early Cold
War years.
General
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